2024 in review: The projects that defined our efforts
As we look ahead to 2024, Meedan is reflecting on what we accomplished together with our partners this year.
Hey Checklisters,
As we prepare for the new year, we’re taking inspiration from our partners and reflecting on all that we’ve achieved together throughout 2024.
If you’re running late, here’s your TL;DR Checklist:
✅ Our 2024 programmatic efforts spanned community engagement, investigative journalism, election initiatives, and more.
✅ In April, Meedan’s global programs and novel open-source software were recognized with a Skoll Award for Social Innovation.
✅ In November, our research with the University of Oxford and other partners won a best paper award at NeurIPS, one of the world’s top machine learning conferences.
Top Comment
For our team here at Meedan, and for our partners around the world, 2024 was a year that tested us in many ways. And it also brought us some big wins. Last April, we were humbled to find ourselves among just four recipients of the Skoll Award for Social Innovation, a top honor in our sector. Alongside a funding boost, the award allowed us to tap into new networks of kindred spirits on our shared quest to make the internet a safer and more equitable place. But most of all, it proved to us just how much power and promise lies within our remarkable community of partners.
Read on for a glimpse into the many efforts of our program, product, and research teams in 2024, all of which were backed by the entire workforce at Meedan, including our committed and compassionate operations department.
Investigative Journalism Fellowships
In June, Meedan launched an initiative sponsoring fellowships for investigative journalism projects in the Larger World. We implemented this effort in collaboration with partner organizations in Iraq, Brazil, and South Asia to support 19 reporting projects covering topics ranging from political violence to environmental degradation to health care access. We look forward to sharing these investigative projects after their release.
Election coalitions on five continents
Throughout the year, we facilitated election-focused coalitions in 11 countries across five continents. Check enabled 53 partner organizations to collaborate with each other and connect with their audiences on messaging services like WhatsApp and Messenger. These projects ranged from large-scale initiatives reaching tens of millions of voters in countries like Mexico and Indonesia to narrowly scoped projects centered on specific issues like gender-based violence in places like Pakistan and Togo.
Community engagement
We also gave community engagement stipends to media outlets and grassroots organizations working to combat misinformation, enhance media literacy, and promote informed participation in elections. We gave grants totaling nearly $40,000 to groups in Brazil, India, Mexico, the Philippines, Tunisia, and Venezuela. We'll highlight their work in future editions.
Product and research
In 2024, findings from our U.S. National Science Foundation-supported project Co·Insights helped drive the creation of explainer articles, one of our new features in Check. With explainers, we expanded Check’s functionality, allowing partner organizations to share broader, more evergreen content with their audiences so they can respond to submissions faster and with a wider variety of content types than was previously possible. Alongside explainers, we also launched shared feeds, which were used to support election initiatives in India, Brazil, and the United States, allowing coalitions to pool queries sourced from their respective tiplines and work together to better understand what issues were dominating online discourse.
Outside of Check, Meedan’s research team has built a prototype that uses generative AI to categorize text from social posts, news stories, and text messages. Other prototypes the team has built can extract keywords and phrases from such content and enable natural language interactions on tiplines. The team has also improved our services for hosting AI models and will soon open source Timpani — a new service for flexible data analysis pipelines. Finally, we’re thrilled that our research with the University of Oxford has won a best paper award at NeurIPS, one of the top machine learning conferences in the world.
Contact us to explore collaboration opportunities today.
Define_technology-facilitated gender-based violence
Checklist readers showed more interest in this definition than all others that we shared in 2024:
“Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV) is an act that is committed using information communication technologies or other digital tools which results in physical, sexual, psychological, social, political or economic harm or other infringements of rights and freedoms.”
— The Sexual Violence Research Initiative, “Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence”
Townsquare
Dec. 31
Migration & Technology Monitor fellowship applications are being accepted until the end of the year. The organization aims to continue creating opportunities for people with lived experiences of migration to meaningfully contribute to research, storytelling, policy, technological implementation, and advocacy conversations.
Jan. 15
APWLD Media Fellowship applications are currently being accepted by The Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development. Now in its sixth year, APWLD Media Fellowship aims to continue creating inclusive and safe spaces for journalists in traditional and new media platforms while showcasing feminist storytelling that highlights the voices of grassroots women in the region and their communities.
Feb. 24-27
RightsCon 2025 will be hosted in Taipei, Taiwan, by Access Now. Register today to convene, connect, and contribute to a shared agenda for the future with a global community of activists, technologists, industry leaders, policymakers, and researchers, and to explore opportunities to advance human rights in the digital age. Meedan will host events on gendered disinformation and impact assessment.
What else we’re reading
“Hadi al-Khatib’s team has been archiving visual evidence of human rights violations in Syria since 2014. The Syrian Archive now has more than seven million records documenting atrocities committed since 2011. The ultimate goal, he said, is to use these records to support Syrian war crimes litigation. ‘Finally, we have access and we are able to go there without being arrested and without being afraid,’ he told Middle East Eye.”
(Sondos Asem, Middle East Eye)
“This decision is unprecedented in Romanian history. It followed the declassification of documents by Romanian intelligence services that exposed evidence of voting manipulation through social media platforms, illegal campaign financing on TikTok, cyber-attacks orchestrated by external forces and suspected Russian interference.”
(Ana Ilulia Solea, The Conversation)
“We refuse to be instrumentalized as white-washing agents for the Saudi regime, as so many other interest groups – from sport to fine art – have been in recent years.”
(Alejandro Mayoral Baños and Quinn McKew, Tech Policy Press)
Did you miss an issue of the Checklist?
Read through the Checklist archive. We’ve explored a diverse range of subjects, including women’s and gender issues, crisis-response strategies, media literacy, elections, AI, and big data.
If there are updates you would like us to share from your country or region, please reach out to us at checklist@meedan.com.
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